Yeap, the presumably less poisonous than mercury red liquid in my re-purposed fridge thermometer has only gone and reached 34.5C this week, on what was widely reported as “the hottest June day for 41 years”, that is, since the summer of 1976. And curiously I was close to the epicentre of the heatwave back in ’76, in FA Cup-winning Southampton, then the hottest place in the country, just as where I am now, a few miles from Heathrow, has been this time.

And once again the record has been somewhat understated. I explained in my post on the topic last September that the true significance of the 13th September 2016 was that it was the hottest day that had been recorded in the UK so late in the year.

You’ve guessed it. The 34.5C recorded at Heathrow this summer solstice was the hottest daily maximum so early in the year. Back in 1976 the temperatures over 35C (peaking at 35.6C in Southampton on 28th) were later in the month. In other words, 21st June 2017 saw a new “date record”.

Admittedly, it was not a particularly notable date record, since 34.4C was recorded at Waddington as early as 3rd June during the glorious post-war summer of the baby-boom year of 1947. And 35.4C at North Heath on 26th June 1976 also seems somewhat more significant than nearly a whole degree less on 21st June. Furthermore, unlike in 1947, 1976, and, for that matter, 1893, only one “daily record” (the hottest maximum for a particular date) was set in the 2017 June heatwave.

Nevertheless, 21st June 2017 set a new date record for 5 days (21st to 25th June, inclusive) and that is of statistical significance. The point is that without global warming you would expect there to be approximately the same number of date records each year, or, more practically, decade. The same is true of daily records, of course – providing a recognised statistical demonstration of global warming – but my innovation of date records provides for a more efficient analysis, since it takes account of the significance of daily records compared to those on neighbouring dates. It makes use of more information in the data.

Supporting the “hypothesis” of warming temperatures, the 5 day date record set on 21st June 2017 exceeds what you would expect in an average year, given that daily temperature records go back over 150 years. On average you’d expect less than 3 days of date records in any given year. But we can’t read too much into one weather event, so how does it look for recent decades?

Last September, I provided a list of UK date records from the hottest day, 10th August, when 38.1C was recorded in Gravesend in 2003 through to October 18th, promising to do some more work next time there was a heatwave. So, keeping my word, we have the following date records:

34.4C – 3rd June 1947 – 18(!) days

34.5C – 21st June 2017 – 5 days

35.4C – 26th June 1976 – 1 day

35.5C – 27th June 1976 – 1 day

35.6C – 28th June 1976 – 3 days

36.7C – 1st July 2015 – 33(!!) days

37.1C – 3rd August 1990 – 7 days (through 9th August)

Obviously, weighting for how exceptionally hot they were, the 2010s have had way, way over their share of exceptionally hot days for the time of year during the summer months. I’m timed out for today, but I will definitely have to get round to an analysis of the whole year! Watch this space.

June 12, 2017

“I think people will interpret membership of the single market as not respecting that referendum.” – John McDonnell

You can’t build a rocket to reach the Moon without understanding the laws of physics. In politics, as in many other fields of human endeavour, we are most likely to succeed not through raw emotion, but when our goals are aligned with logic and a clear understanding of the real world. Thus, political projects have for centuries been informed by the carefully crafted logical, evidence-based arguments of thinkers from Adam Smith to Karl Marx.

Somewhat more parochially, the UK will only resolve its Brexit conundrum by finding a solution that works in practice, not just in the fevered imagination of one or other political leader.

Why do I say we’re in a “Brexit conundrum”? Surely we’ve voted for Brexit and should “just get on with it!”. Well, no – putting the hard-line “Remoaners” to one side for the moment – it’s not quite as simple as that: the argument now is apparently over whether we have a “soft Brexit” or a “hard Brexit”. Oh well, I hear from the gallery, we were going to have a “hard Brexit”, but Theresa has put her expensively shod foot in some seriously pungent doo-doo and now we’ll have to have a “soft Brexit”.

Yes, it seems to have turned out that a “hard Brexit” is not a politically viable option, though David Davis and Liam Fox are still in denial. Nor is a “hard Brexit” economically viable, I might add. Never mind, “just get on with it!!”, say the great British public: we’re more concerned about the NHS and inequality anyway.

Unfortunately, it’s still not quite as simple as that.

Why? Because a “soft Brexit” is not a logically viable option. If it was, Theresa May would probably have proposed it already, since, contrary to popular belief, she and her advisers are not entirely stupid. No, it turns out that, no sooner have you pulled on one loose thread of the UK’s relationship with the EU, than you’re standing in front of the nation completely starkers, as Theresa May hinted during the election campaign.

For example, if we go “hard” and leave the European customs union, then, for starters, there’s a border problem in Ireland, not to mention with Gibraltar. Huge bureaucratic costs arise for business, plus we revert to WTO tariffs on all our trade until we can negotiate something different. Enough! Let’s stay in the customs union, then, you say. Oh, but then we wouldn’t be able to negotiate our own trade deals. We need to do that to offset leaving the single market. And trade is kind of important because we need to import stuff. Like food.

OK, then, let’s stay in the single market. Ah. But then we’d retain free movement (I know I am on record as thinking that’s a good thing, but I’m trying to be detached and objective here). And, incidentally, be subject to the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) court, which apparently doesn’t violate our precious sovereignty as much as the European Court of Justice (ECJ), though I’m not sure the great British public would be fully appreciative of the fine distinction.

Hmm, surely we can remain members of uncontroversial European agencies, Euratom, perhaps? Nope, sorry, not unless we submit to the authority of the ECJ (which Labour don’t happen to feel is worth mentioning in their manifesto, I note), assuming we haven’t already done so by trying to stay in the customs union.

So the dilemma facing the nation’s glorious leadership cadre is to propose either a “hard Brexit” – which might not have got through the Commons even before the General Election and would lead to years of economic chaos and decades of underperformance – or opt for a “soft Brexit”, which would involve remaining in the single market and customs union, but also mean retaining the ECJ and free movement, and (presumably) land us with the same £50-100bn bill as hard Brexit would, as well as no influence over the single market and customs union rules nor the ability to negotiate our own trade deals.

In other words, dare I say it, if we don’t have a “hard Brexit” we may as well stay in the EU.

This is the logic trap in which we find ourselves.

This is why the Labour Manifesto, as David Davis correctly points out, pretty much paraphrases the Tory government’s Brexit White Paper. Labour write:

“We will scrap the Conservatives’ Brexit White Paper and replace it with fresh negotiating priorities that have a strong emphasis on retaining the benefits of the Single Market and the Customs Union.”

“The [government’s] white paper [die!, evil capital letters, die!] reiterates that the government aims to secure ‘the freest and most frictionless trade possible in goods and services’ with the EU outside the single market and via ‘an ambitious and comprehensive free trade agreement’.

[The Tory government] also wants to be outside the customs union, so it can negotiate its own trade deals, but would like ‘a new customs agreement’, which should be theoretically possible thanks to new technology. … [No kidding, this really is their argument]

… [T]he UK will not seek to adopt an existing model used by other countries, but try to ‘take in elements’ of the single market in certain areas – in other words, bespoke deals for important business sectors. From the EU perspective, all this is ambitious: it sounds suspiciously like cherry-picking.”

Of course, Labour’s presentation during the election campaign was very different to that of the Tories, emphasising that they’d prioritise the economy over immigration, for example, but in essence both are just nuanced versions of Boris claiming he can simultaneously have his cake and shove it into his stupid gob, spraying crumbs and spittle in all directions.

To be crystal clear, my proposal is that anyone – EU citizen or not – who has legally lived and worked in the UK for a qualifying period of let’s say 3 years should be entitled to vote in all elections and any referenda, the same as UK and Commonwealth citizens. Essentially I agree with the “If you live here, you can vote here” position advocated by Jon Danzig, a man who clearly has more than the one blog.

Simple arithmetic suggests it may well be the case that the Brexit Referendum would not have been lost had EU citizens had the vote. But I believe the disenfranchisement has had much more insidious effects on our political discourse. As Danzig notes, we’ve been “talking about them as if they’re not in the room”, during the referendum campaign, even more so afterwards, but also for years before. Had politicians had to take UK resident EU citizens’ votes into account the tone of election campaigning over the years might well have been very different and we might never have had the Brexit referendum at all.

We’ve become accustomed to talking about EU citizens as separate from our “communities” – thereby undoing half a century of community relations effort, as I’ll explain another time – but exactly how can we justify denying them the vote?

Do EU citizens living in the UK have less of a stake in the country’s future than do UK citizens? Well, they are living here, paying their taxes and reliant on the rule of British law and the provision of state services exactly the same as UK citizens, though of course the details depend on everyone’s individual situation.

Are they here only temporarily? Well, they might be, but the 3 year qualifying period for a vote suggests at least some commitment to the UK. The majority will most likely stay considerably longer, not least because most of them are in work. On the other hand, some UK citizens may emigrate, maybe to retire abroad. We don’t deny categories of UK citizens the vote on the basis that they’re statistically more likely to move overseas. Even if EU citizens are more likely to leave the UK in the 5 years after a General Election, the number leaving will be only a fraction of those who have been here 3 years or more already, many of them for a decade or more, so the possibility hardly seems to justify denying all of them the vote. Besides, I could even argue that the EU citizens who leave the UK during the 5 years after a General Election in some sense “speak for” the EU citizens who may move to the UK after that election, not having had a vote.

So there doesn’t seem to be a rational justification for denying EU citizens a vote in General Elections (or referenda) on the basis that they have less stake in the outcome – or less responsibility for the decisions taken by the elected government, for example in terms of paying taxes.

What about other responsibilities? I’m thinking of the Colonel Blimps who “fought for this country” or rather whose parents or grandparents did. Well, many EU citizens could argue that their parents or grandparents fought on the same side in the same wars. More fundamentally, do we really want to grant the vote only to those who pass some test as to the contribution of previous generations?

OK, so what about future responsibilities for the defence of the realm? For the vast majority of us that simply comes down to paying the taxes that pay for professional armed forces, taxes that apply to EU migrant workers as much as to UK citizens. We don’t have conscription any more, but even if we did, would it even exclude the 18 year old children of EU citizens who’ve settled in the UK, children who may well be British citizens?

So there doesn’t seem to be a case for denying the vote to EU citizens living in the UK on the basis that they have less responsibility towards the country or have done less for it in the past.

What about ancestry, then? On one talk-show during the referendum campaign I heard a woman suggest that her family had been in the UK for 700 years and that this gave her greater rights than her interlocutor, who, as I recollect, could only claim a century or two. Well, I rather suspect everyone’s ancestry is more complex than that, judging by my own family history and that of those celebs who’ve explored theirs on some TV programme, the name of which escapes me just now. The practicality of DNA tests to measure Britishness would be undermined by the mongrel nature of our nation, as well as, perhaps, by the political need to ensure the Royal Family score highly. The blood-line idea is twaddle, isn’t it?

That leaves us with the idea of citizenship. But that is undermined on two counts:

First, EU citizens resident in the UK have never had to apply for UK citizenship. They have been treated equally with UK citizens under EU treaties (incorporated into UK law), for example, in their entitlement to grants and loans for higher education. They haven’t even had to apply for Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILTR) as some foreign residents need to.

And, as I mentioned in previous posts, people don’t change their citizenship unless they have to. Doing so may involve giving up some rights in their country of origin. People don’t necessarily make a decision to stay permanently – that is something that just happens. And they may reason that, depending on how the UK and other economies do, they might need to look for work in another EU country, Germany say, sometime in the future. It wouldn’t make sense applying for a UK passport. Besides, it costs around £1000 (for EU citizens) in the UK nowadays (an agenda item for the Brexit discussions, perhaps) and you have to do a stupid test, involving, I understand, the need to memorise the names of the Eastenders and Coronation Street pubs. If the only advantage is getting a vote, the price is too high for most people.

The right to participate in the democratic process is surely a right, not something you may have to pay for.

Second, and here’s the kicker, other UK residents born overseas do get a vote, even if they’ve been here less time than EU citizens. In general, non-EU citizens who want to reside in the UK either have to become UK citizens, giving them the right to vote, or apply for ILTR, which doesn’t confer the right to vote but is usually a necessary step to naturalisation.

So an EU citizen may have lived and worked in the UK for 10 years, the same as an American. But the American has had more incentive to naturalise, since doing so may be necessary to ensure continued residency, for example, if they wish to spend time outside the UK (which could result in ILTR status lapsing). Though, as I said at the outset, the American should have the right to vote even if they haven’t taken UK citizenship or even obtained ILTR.

And while we’re at it, why should one American living in the UK with ILTR status (or even without such status) not have a vote, while another who has become a UK citizen does have one? Especially if the American who has become a UK citizen has done so because they wished to spend a few years abroad before returning to the UK?!

It’s absurd that the right to participate in the UK’s democracy depends on the details of the process you have to follow to maintain residency rights.

The big inconsistency, though, is with Commonwealth and Irish citizens. When I first looked into this I thought Commonwealth citizens needed ILTR status in order to vote. I now realise when I read the relevant explanation more carefully that they only need to be in the UK legally:

“A qualifying Commonwealth citizen is someone who has leave to enter or remain in the UK, or does not require such leave.”

So, not only are Commonwealth-born UK residents more likely to have become UK citizens – in order to lock-in their right to reside in the UK – than are those from the EU who’ve come to live here under the EU’s free movement provisions and who haven’t needed to lock-in residency rights (at least up until the Brexit referendum), they don’t need to become a citizen to get a vote anyway.

It might be worth pointing out that the Commonwealth now includes some countries – Rwanda and Mozambique – that have no particular historic connection to the UK. They’ve merely joined the Commonwealth, perhaps out of dissatisfaction with their own former colonial power or simply to enhance their international profile or even just to create more competitive opportunities for their sportspeople! Of course, in terms of affecting the outcome of elections or referenda, the number of UK resident Rwandan and Mozambique citizens is insignificant. But it’s the principle that counts.

The franchise for UK general elections and national referenda is not only illogical but also discriminatory.

It should be amended forthwith on the principle of “If you live here, you can vote here”.

Furthermore, carelessness over this one detail may very well have cost us our EU membership, a disaster the scale of which only history will be able to judge, though perhaps they should place the portrait of David Cameron that, following tradition, will soon adorn the walls of No 10, right next to that of Lord North.

Much was also made of the fact that we had 3 days in a row last week when the temperature broke 30C for the first time in September in 87 years.

But the significance of the 34.4C last Tuesday was understated.

The important record was that the temperature last Tuesday was the highest ever recorded so late in the year, since the only higher temperatures – 34.6C on 8th September 1911 (the year of the “Perfect Summer”, with the word “Perfect” used as in “Perfect Storm”) and 35.0C on 1st rising to 35.6C on 2nd during the Great Heatwave of 1906 – all occurred earlier in the month. By the way, in 1906 it also reached 34.2C on 3rd September. That’s 3 days in a row over 34C. Take that 2016. They recorded 34.9C on 31st August 1906 to boot, as they might well have put it back then.

No, what’s really significant this year is that we now know it’s possible for the temperature to reach 34.4C as late as 13th September which we didn’t know before.

I’m going to call this a “date record”, for want of a better term. Any date record suggests either a once in 140 years freak event (since daily temperature records go back that far, according to my trusty copy of The Wrong Kind of Snow) or that it’s getting warmer.

One way to demonstrate global warming statistically is to analyse the distribution of record daily temperatures, i.e. the hottest 1st Jan, 2nd Jan and so on. Now, if the climate has remained stable, you’d expect these daily records to be evenly distributed over time, a similar number each decade, for example, since 1875 when the records were first properly kept. But if the climate is warming you’d expect more such records in recent decades. I haven’t carried out the exercise, but I’d be surprised if we haven’t had more daily records per decade since 1990, say, than in the previous 115 years.

It occurs to me that another, perhaps quicker, way to carry out a similar exercise would be to look at the date records. You’d score these based on how many days they apply for. For example, the 34.4C on 13th September 2016 is also higher than the record daily temperatures for 12th, 11th, 10th and 9th September, back to that 34.6C on 8th September 1911. So 13th September 2016 “scores” 5 days.

Here’s a list of date records starting with the highest temperature ever recorded in the UK:

38.1C – 10th August 2003 – counts for 1 day, since, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we have to assume 10th August is the day when it “should” be hottest

36.1C – 19th August 1932 – 9 days

35.6C – 2nd September 1906 – 14 days

34.6C – 8th September 1911 – 6 days

34.4C – 13th September 2016 – 5 days

31.9C – 17th September 1898 – 4 days

31.7C – 19th September 1926 – 2 days

30.6C – 25th September 1895 – 6 days

30.6C – 27th September 1895 – 2 days

29.9C – 1st October 2011 – 4 days

29.3C – 2nd October 2011 – 1 day

28.9C – 5th October 1921 – 3 days

28.9C – 6th October 1921 – 1 day

27.8C – 9th October 1921 – 3 days

25.9C – 18th October 1997 – 9 days

And you could also compile a list of date records going back from 10th August, i.e. the earliest in the year given temperatures have been reached.

The list above covers a late summer/early autumn sample of just 70 days, but you can see already that the current decade accounts for 10 of those days, that is, around 14%, during 5% of the years. The 2000s equal and the 1990s exceed expectations in this very unscientific exercise.

Obviously I need to analyse the whole year to draw firmer conclusions. Maybe I’ll do that and report back, next time a heatwave grabs my attention.

It’s also interesting to note that the “freakiest” day in the series was 2nd September 1906, with a daily record temperature hotter than for any of the previous 13 days. 2nd freakiest was 19th August 1932 – suggesting (together with 2nd September 1906) that perhaps the real story is an absence of late August heatwaves in the global warming era – joint with 18th October 1997, a hot day perhaps made more extreme by climate change.

Am I just playing with numbers? Or is there a serious reason for this exercise?

You bet there is.

I strongly suspect that there’s now the potential for a sustained UK summer heatwave with many days in the high 30Cs. A “Perfect Summer” turbocharged by global warming could be seriously problematic. I breathe a sigh of relief every year we dodge the bullet.

September 9, 2016

I’ve worked out why I’m overcome with rage whenever I hear Frank Field championing the needs of the “ordinary white working class”, in the Guardian’s words (it’s not clear whether Field actually said “white”), besides, that is, his uncanny resemblance to Ian Richardson’s Francis Urquhart in the original UK early 1990s House of Cards series. I suspect that Field and I see the world quite differently. Hence my irritation.

The contrast between Field and, for example, Gordon Brown could not be more stark. It seems to me that Brown, and Blair for that matter, both share my view that, when in power, whilst they represented the British people – and they are patriotic – their concerns were not limited to the welfare of the British. Others, Poles and Romanians, say, deserve no more or less than us Brits. You could say that Brown, Blair and the many others who supported the Remain side, including myself, are internationalists, but there may be a more fundamental distinction – between open and closed thinking. An example of closed system thinking is to carefully conduct a laboratory experiment, varying only one factor at a time; but the real world is an open system, with numerous uncontrollable variables. Closed thinkers only want to worry about their own area of concern; open system thinkers grapple with complexity. I’m sure Frank Field believes Poles deserve a good life just as much as Brits do. I presume he just doesn’t think it’s his problem.

But that means Field has to ignore many of the people who make up today’s British society. And it seems to me that the specific closed way in which he is thinking is to consider only what I will term the “rooted” classes, the people Labour has historically represented. Perhaps this form of closed thinking explains in part why there’s not only a divide down the middle of the Conservative Party, but also a damaging – because the issue is so fundamental – schism in the Labour Party, the majority enthusiastic for Remain on one side and Field, Gisela Stuart, Kate Hoey, John Mann and Dennis Skinner, to name the most high-profile Brexiteers – assuming we take Corbyn’s Remain stance at face value – on the other.

Just because the Tories are divided over Europe doesn’t mean Labour has to be. The vocal minority of Labour Brexiteers (4% of their MPs said Field) have done untold damage to the Party, as well as skewed the referendum debate by portraying Labour as more evenly split on the issue than it in fact is. I expect many enthusiastic Remainers will transfer their allegiance to the Lib Dems, especially if Corbyn stays on as Labour leader.

So, to the point I wanted to make in this post. It seems to me that we have to begin with the observation that within each social class, in the UK specifically, but also elsewhere – however many classes you want to define – we have a significant subdivision that I would describe as “mobile”. For simplicity’s sake, I contrast these people with those we might term “rooted”. So we have skilled and unskilled or “blue collar” and “white collar” working class who will seek employment only near where they live, which is most likely where their parents live. “Community” – a term which I find to be another source of irritation, since it is far too often glibly used to refer to all those living in an area, whether they ever talk to their neighbours or not – is all important to them. But we also have skilled and unskilled, “blue collar” and “white collar” working class, however you want to divide them, who are prepared to travel across continents for employment.

Many of the uber-rich are extremely mobile, seemingly basing themselves in multiple global centres or even, to rub in the point, on £200m yachts, though some are undoubtedly more rooted than others. Though having said that, it occurs to me that it’s not unknown for even royal families to spend a generation or two in exile.

For large numbers of professionals – the middle classes, if you like – the employment market is national, if not international or even global. In fact, given the custom in the UK of leaving home to attend university, many of us relocate, at least temporarily, while still in education.

Some industries are so concentrated in small numbers of geographical clusters – consider Hollywood, the City of London, the English Premier League – that, if you want work, you’re pretty much obliged to relocate. Great cities, such as London and New York, are magnets for the aspirational. Companies increasingly require employees to relocate, often across borders – I’ve been told myself that “international experience” may be necessary for career progression.

Of course, not everyone, not even a majority, move to another country, but mobility has been a feature of the last few decades of globalisation.

Although many have emigrated for centuries, in particular to the New World, to some extent renewed mobility has recently trickled down to what Frank Field would call the working classes. Or let’s put it another way. Many families have become rooted over the last century or so, particularly in those former industrial heartlands we hear about that voted Brexit so strongly. Their ancestors, several generations ago, left the countryside during the era of urbanisation ushered in by the Industrial Revolution.

Other families, such as my own, have moved intermittently for generations, around the country and around the world. For many, moving for work, or for personal reasons, is just something you do. You make a life where you find yourself. I have never had any expectation of remaining in the same locality for my whole life.

Here’s my proposition. At the present time there is a conflict of interests, at least in the UK, between the rooted classes and the mobile classes. This was a critical divide between Remainers and Leavers in the Brexit referendum. The rooted classes see the mobile classes as a threat. This is particularly the case amongst Field’s “ordinary white working class”. And, indeed, in some ways they are a threat, since as a society we have allowed rights and privileges to accrue to the rooted classes, in particular entitlement to housing. But, as in the Industrial Revolution, as in the urbanisation of modern China, economic growth and development has always thrived on mobility. And the economy never stands still. You can’t make a decision to freeze the economy as it is – you’ll be destroyed by competition. The mobile classes are essential to the process of economic renewal, to support technological change. That’s why it’s a mistake for policy to be determined solely by the needs of the rooted classes.

A large part of the reason for the schism in the Labour Party, then, is that the Brexiteers, particularly the likes of Frank Field, see themselves as representing the rooted “ordinary white working class”. And, to be honest, they have a point, if they take the narrow view that they represent those who vote for them. Because we – the UK and the EU – have shamefully allowed the mobile classes to become disenfranchised. Not only were citizens of other EU countries living, working and paying taxes in the UK denied a vote in the Brexit referendum, so, ludicrously, were UK citizens living overseas, even in Europe, if they’d left this country more than the arbitrary number of 15 years ago.

In part this disenfranchisement has occurred because the rooted classes are seen as privileged. And see themselves that way too, no doubt – I’m sure there is a certain kind of Brit who would be apoplectic at the idea of giving the vote to “EU migrant workers”. It’s this idea of the “nation” as a people, rather than a place, of course – an idea which perhaps another time I will argue is unsustainable, though I doubt I have anything new to say on such a longstanding and tediously emotive question – together with the idea of citizenship, which rather ignores the fact that a large part of the point of free movement of labour in the EU was to avoid the bureaucracy and emotional hurdle of the citizenship process. The aim of course was to create a mobile workforce, with individuals perhaps working in the UK today and Germany tomorrow – something Brexit will no doubt make a more common experience!

But citizenship is only a piece of paper (or a bit in a Home Office computer these days, I suppose). Granting citizenship to immigrants doesn’t necessarily reflect either commitment on the part of the new arrival, though of course it may often do so, nor assimilation into British society. People become citizens in large part because they need to or perceive that they need to, especially given the significant cost involved to apply in the UK nowadays. And EU citizens living in the UK under free movement provisions in EU treaties haven’t needed to become citizens, even though they may be just as committed to the UK and integrated into our society than arrivals from elsewhere who have taken citizenship. In fact, EU citizens have not up to now had to apply for “indefinite leave to remain” in the UK, a status which gives citizens of Commonwealth countries the right to vote in General Elections and referenda.

Thus recent immigrants to the UK from non-EU countries who became UK citizens soon after arrival in this country were able to vote in the Brexit referendum, whereas citizens of EU countries who’d lived here for decades were not. Compounding the problem, citizens of Commonwealth countries with UK residency status were also allowed to vote, even from those Commonwealth countries which were never British colonies, as in the case of francophone Rwanda and Mozambique, who seemingly joined the Commonwealth out of dissatisfaction with their own former colonial power. And the status of citizens of Zimbabwe, suspended from the Commonwealth, was so unclear, I had considerable trouble finding out whether or not they were allowed a vote (for the record, I’m pretty sure they were)! Most of these enfranchised non-UK citizens were also non-EU citizens, but there is in fact overlap between the Commonwealth and the EU, so citizens of Malta and Cyprus could vote. As could many hundreds of thousands of Irish citizens living the in the UK, for separate historical reasons. You could hardly make it up.

The electoral bias against the mobile classes arises not just from the electoral franchise, though. Even when they have the vote, people may not know who to vote for. They are likely to be unfamiliar with the UK’s political parties. And our political structures are geographically based, favouring the rooted classes. Those who have lived in an area for many years are much more likely to join political parties. Not only will they have an understanding of local issues, they are also much more likely to see their involvement as a worthwhile investment of time. The political agenda is consequently driven by the rooted classes.

The idea of the Brexit referendum, indeed, any electoral process, was to weigh the views of all those affected by the decision – in this case all those with a direct stake in the UK’s membership of the EU. Excluding large numbers of the mobile classes simply biased the vote. For the mobile classes the opportunities provided by the EU may outweigh any downsides, whereas for the rooted classes aspects of the EU may seem a threat, perhaps one not sufficiently counterbalanced by the benefits to the UK economy. To reach the right decision all these individual experiences need to be taken into account. And since the outcome was 52% plays 48% – a difference of a bit over a million votes – somewhat less than the number of EU citizens living in the UK but denied a vote, let alone the total if we also took into account the UK citizens who’ve been living abroad for more than 15 years, it’s very likely that we’ve actually reached the wrong answer as to what is best for the UK.

August 23, 2016

In my previous post, I argued that free movement is the best way to organise migration. During the referendum campaign we heard Boris Johnson parrot the phrase “Australian-style points system” with nauseating regularity. Putting to one side the inconvenient fact that even Australia doesn’t have an Australian-style points system, since a large majority of migrants to Australia are brought in through company sponsorship schemes, I nevertheless assumed that the UK would, after Brexit, attempt to implement some kind of points-based system.

I argued that a points-based system was misguided, in part because it’s bound to reduce social mobility within the UK. Nevertheless, as the Guardian reports, a survey by ICM on behalf of a think-tank, albeit one I’d never previously heard of, called British Future, found that “[o]nly 12% [of the sample] want to cut the number of highly skilled workers migrating to Britain; nearly half (46%) would like to see an increase, with 42% saying that it should stay the same.” Baffling. Why exactly are we leaving the EU?

But, part way through my previous post, it became clear that a pure points-based system might not be what all the Brexiteers have in mind. I quoted David Goodhart writing in Prospect magazine in favour of “guest citizenship”. According to Goodhart, free movement has led to many EU citizens coming to the UK who “do not want or need to become British”, causing an “integration problem”. He claims that “unnecessary resentment” has been created by “the lack of a distinction between full and guest citizenship”. Utter poppycock. The problem is the reverse. Voters are afraid, so they tell us, of their communities being changed by immigration. If they thought migrant workers were here only temporarily one might reasonably suppose they’d be less, not more, concerned. In a Wonderland Alice-like leap of logic, Goodhart somehow argues that because many migrants don’t stay forever they should be prevented from doing so, ignoring the common-sense argument that people don’t usually make a decision to stay forever in advance. Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. Roots are put down over a long period of time. Moss gathers only slowly on stones. And so on.

To put my cards on the table, I find Goodhart’s views fairly, well, abhorrent is the word that comes to mind. He notes in passing, for example, that “the right of people to bring in dependents should be reviewed.” It seems to me that if you’re working somewhere, you should be able to make your life there. Not every migrant worker will choose to do so, of course, and some jobs necessarily involve spending time away from one’s family, but settling where you work is the norm, and I don’t see what right the UK has to prevent it. Doing so is exploitation, pure and simple, taking advantage of the weaker economic circumstances in some other parts of the world.

So I was a bit disappointed to read Alistair Campbell’s musings in The New European (“My memo to Mrs May…”, issue 2, July 15-21 2016) drifting towards Goodhart’s position:

“…in addition to discussing terms of exit, you would like [sic] to explore the possible terms on which we might stay, including another look at immigration… Might freedom of movement become freedom of labour, for example?”

No, Alistair, we should simply be asking for what the EU failed to accept first time round when Cameron asked, which is renewed transition controls with those countries from which there is a large net flow to the UK. Clearly, 7 years has not proved to be anything like enough for the economies of Eastern Europe to converge with those in the West. This would save the principle of free movement by amending the rules, rather than sacrificing the principle to rigid, ill-thought-out rules that were drafted on the basis of no experience whatsoever.

The bizarre situation we find ourselves in is that we’ve voted to leave the EU in part because of the number of migrants into rural areas – Boston, Lincolnshire, had the highest Brexit vote – but, judging by the frequent dire warnings from food producers, supposedly we are going to have to create (presumably time-limited) work-permit schemes to maintain the migrant work-force in those very same areas! Yeap, we need temporary migrants to replace people who, according to David Goodhart, were treating “our national home… as a transit camp and a temporary inconvenience.”

We’ve got a big problem here. On many levels, not just that of how society values different jobs, an aspect Peter Fleming emphasises.

According to the food producers, we have to produce as much food in the UK as possible. Even though farming less intensively and leaving more land fallow would surely reduce soil depletion and enhance our ability to feed ourselves in the long-term. Do we really think our national security is at risk if we have to buy cucumbers from Poland or Romania, rather than employ Poles and Romanians to pick cucumbers grown in East Anglia? Of course it isn’t.

And apparently migrants on low wages are essential to our food production. Yet those communities ultimately sustained by farming – Boston, Lincolnshire and its ilk – don’t want East European shops and voices on their high street. I guess Goodhart envisages migrant permits forcing workers to stay on the farm 24/7 – how else to prevent them shopping or speaking in Boston High Street? – and, I presume, traveling in blacked out vehicles to and from Stansted for their Wizzair flights.

But what bothers me most is the general attitude that it is acceptable for non-UK citizens to live in conditions that the locals aren’t expected to put up with. The fact that only migrant workers will do certain jobs should not be a reason for ensuring a continual flow of migrant workers under schemes denying them rights to make a life in the UK. Rather, it should be a warning that working conditions in those jobs are exploitative. Pay – that is, the minimum wage – needs to be increased. Only when British workers apply for such jobs should we employ migrant workers with a clear conscience.

And I seem to recollect that seasonal fruit-picking jobs were advertised in local newspapers back in the day (I’m talking ’70s and ’80s). I read such ads as a kid and wondered if I could get some pocket-money that way. Students, I recall, habitually supplemented their grants by helping bring in the harvest – grape-picking in France being the coolest gig.

The government should simply face down the farming lobby. Tell them they’ll simply have to pay more after Brexit. Put the minimum wage up faster than currently planned to give them a clue as to what they should be paying. Don’t give them an exploitative migrant-worker scheme. And don’t give one either to any of the many other industries that are also no doubt lobbying ferociously behind the scenes. If some jobs move overseas and we have to import cucumbers, so be it. It makes no economic sense for the UK to do everything – the theory of comparative advantage and all that.

The tragic thing is that if we hadn’t accepted over the last decade that it was OK to employ migrants on lower pay than Brits would accept for the same work and conditions we might not be Brexiting in the first place.

August 9, 2016

In the days before the Brexit referendum I found myself unable to focus on anything other than the last frantic round of debates, speeches and pleas. It was clear to me even before the vote that there are several huge interconnected problems with our political culture which could lead to a major political accident. So I began drafting a letter/paper to send, initially to my MP. Of course, the exercise grew like Topsy and, whilst I may still produce a single document, I’m breaking it up in the first instance and posting it on my rather appropriately named blog.

My original idea was to be clever and couch my thoughts as “regardless of the result of the referendum”, so please don’t think my views are just a snap reaction to the setback.

My overall view has consistently been that the referendum should never have been called and that, even if we Brexit, we must rebuild and strengthen our trading, political and cultural relationships with Europe. Isolation is not the answer. Instead we must address the causes of so much dissatisfaction and fix our democracy.

We mustn’t just roll over. Rather, we need to be tough not only on Brexit, but also on the causes of Brexit!

The most significant issue for Remain was the utter, abject failure – not just during the referendum campaign, but over many years – to build a case for free movement within the EU, or, strictly speaking, the single market of the European Economic Area (EEA), which includes a few additional countries in addition to the EU. The desirability or otherwise of free movement remains a live issue, since the UK may wish to stay in the single market, members of which are supposed to permit free movement. Since UK membership of the single market would be highly desirable, it’s definitely worthwhile to start making a coherent argument in favour of free movement. The horse may have bolted, but it’s still in sight.

First, let me define my terms.

“Immigrants” vs “EU migrant workers”

The core issue in the referendum campaign was “immigration”, though, whatever Teresa “Maggie” May, and many other politicians and commentators are now saying to justify their stance on immigration controls, the question on the ballot paper was Leave or Remain, so the vote gives no clear indication of the level of opposition to free movement.

Furthermore the scapegoats for all our problems are not actually “immigrants”. Immigrants arrive on visas and are generally on a path to citizenship. At some point, very soon in many cases, they get to vote.

The term “immigration” suggests an intention of permanency from the outset, whereas “migration” is less committal. It may or may not lead to long-term residence. It’s unlikely to involve an immediate change of citizenship.

I’ll therefore use the term “EU migrant workers” to refer to those who are in the UK under the free movement provisions of EU treaties. I should say that, whatever the context, I don’t like the negative connotations of the word “immigrant” and I’d prefer a more distinct term with a different root rather than “EU migrant workers”. But those are the words we have and it’s kind of important to actually be understood.

Of course, some EU citizens come to the UK for reasons other than to work or to seek work. Such “EU migrants” may be economically self-sufficient – retired or the wealthy enjoying the London lifestyle, perhaps – and are unlikely to be able to claim benefits or subsidised housing. The issues cited in the referendum campaign relate, though, mostly to “EU migrant workers”, not “EU migrants”.

The Rationale for Free Movement of Labour

Why does the EU insist on freedom of movement within the single market? It seems not to have occurred to the leaders of the Remain campaign to try to answer this simple question.

When I started drafting this post I assumed that the argument for free movement would have been clearly stated by the founding fathers (sorry, they seem to have all been male) of the EU (or, strictly, of the organisation’s predecessor, the EEC). If there is such a statement – and I may research further – it’s not likely to rank highly in any citation index. We’re not talking about the Rights of Man, here.

No, all accounts I have seen suggest that the freedom of movement we see now evolved from an initial freedom of movement specifically to work, that is from the free movement of labour.

I’ll come onto why free movement purely to work is unworkable (intended, of course – I can’t resist a play on words) in a fair society, but, first, why is the free movement of labour so important?

The argument is not often stated clearly, but there are several threads of thought:

First, the observation was made in the mid 20th century – predating the EEC, I understand (sorry, more research needed) – that one reason the US economy is more dynamic than Europe’s is because of the higher rates of migration between states in the US than between countries in Europe. This allows new industries – Motown, Hollywood, Silicon Valley – to develop rapidly and regions to regenerate through “creative destruction” rather than stagnate when the local economy declines – Detroit, for example.

Second, it’s often said that free movement of labour is necessary for free movement of capital. I take this to mean that if companies or an entire industry moves, or an industrial cluster exhausts the local labour supply, trained workers can move too. The alternative would be skilled workers in one country having to retrain or be unemployed, whereas workers in another country have to acquire the relevant skills. Those with a vocation may be frustrated in their ambitions. This aspect of European free movement is presumably most beneficial in very highly-skilled occupations, such as research and financial services.

Third, free movement benefits the European economy as a whole when one or more countries face an economic downturn. As we’re seeing now, young people from some of the southern European countries which suffered most in the euro crisis, who would otherwise be unemployed, are able to find work in the UK and other economies where demand is presently creating more jobs. Or, conversely, one economy may boom and draw in labour from its neighbours. Germany’s post-WWII economic miracle led to “Gastarbeiter” (literally “guest-worker”) deals with its neighbours (and, famously, Turkey) which clearly foreshadowed more general free movement in Europe (and complemented free movement between the Treaty of Rome signatories).

Why Free Movement of Labour is Not Enough

Having established free movement of labour – relatively uncontroversial for some decades, certainly in the UK – the EU in 1992, through the Maastricht treaty, and by various directives and court rulings, granted additional rights to EU nationals resident in other member countries, in effect a form of EU citizenship.

There’s little disagreement about the basic narrative of how freedom of movement of labour became EU citizenship, though if you listen to Farage or Johnson you’d assume it was mission-creep, perhaps a plot by European superstate zealots.

But if you reflect for a moment on how people live their lives it’s obvious that freedom of movement purely to work is not enough. People put down roots where they work. They may want to retire there. They start families, or have children already. Crucially, because people don’t necessarily make a conscious decision that they’re going to remain forever in their adopted EU country, they don’t tend to apply for citizenship. So the rights of EU nationals to benefits, pensions, housing, healthcare, education of their children and so on has to be protected and on the same basis as the locals. This is simply a logical consequence, which should have been instituted from the outset.

There are, however, those who deny this logical consequence. For example, David Goodhart argues in Prospect magazine (August 2016) that:

“A guest citizen is not a full member, does not have full access to social and political rights and leaves after a few years. Formalising guest citizenship would mean that we could concentrate rights, benefits and integration efforts on those who are making a commitment to this country. … If we don’t want to continue with relatively high inflows we have to guard full citizenship more jealously.”

During the entire Brexit referendum campaign I only heard one voice defending free movement. Mine. I piped up, somewhat uncharacteristically, in a meeting organised by UCL, where the aforementioned David Goodhart was one of the panelists, to point out that, from the point of view of the home country of migrant workers, free movement is preferable to a points-based system. It’s less of a brain-drain. So, I tried to explain, EU countries aren’t going to agree to anything less than free movement as part of any Brexit negotiations.

Goodhart seized on what I said to emphasise that migration in itself is a brain-drain, period, twisting the point I’d made. So, having put my head over the parapet I had to reiterate my point that free movement is less problematic than a points-based system, since not only doctors are being tempted abroad; their patients are as well. Wealth-creators may leave for sunnier climes; but so do the unemployed.

The problem with Goodhart’s suggestion that free movement has been bad for migrants’ home countries is that their governments – most vocally Poland in the UK context – simply don’t agree with it. And he doesn’t repeat his claim in his Prospect article, acknowledging that migration to the UK has been an “unemployment safety valve for struggling southern or eastern European economies”.

But free movement is not only preferable to a points-based system from the point of view of the originating country. It’s also better for the UK.

First, free movement is simple. A points-based system not only requires a huge bureaucracy just to keep track of who should be working and who shouldn’t – a dead-weight cost on economic activity – it also implies some bod in Westminster making decisions on how many pheasant-pluckers and widget-testers the UK “needs”. And all the lobbying that’s bound to accompany the process. No wonder that in the example of the Australian system that is always cited, the vast majority of immigrants come in with company sponsorship – recruited abroad, something the Brexit brigade are always railing against.

Second, free movement is flexible. Because it doesn’t involve granting citizenship, migrant workers remain mobile. Should they fail to retain work in the UK they can return to their home country or go to any other EU country. In particular, they lubricate the free movement safety-valve (if that’s not taking the metaphor too far) – in the event of a downturn in the UK (as we will no doubt see during the post-Brexit recession) those who have already migrated to the UK for work are no doubt better equipped than UK nationals to find work in their home country or elsewhere rather than swell the numbers of job-seekers in this country. Perhaps flexibility is why David Goodhart champions a work permit scheme. But such schemes are flexible only for the host country, not the migrant workers. If the UK proposes to the EU a system of sector-specific time-limited work permits – as Goodhart seems to be advocating – in return for access to markets they’ll no doubt be told where to go.

Third, if we did institute a points-based scheme to address skills-shortages, won’t that reduce even further the incentive for UK employers to train British workers? Or to promote them. At present, migration from outside the EU is in part capped by salary requirements. So your employer can recruit senior staff, but not junior ones. Is that really what you want more of?

And, fourth, free movement also confers rights. What is possibly achieved by restricting migration to and from countries from which the net population flow is low? Restrictions on movement are almost bound to be reciprocated, so, if Brexit leads to the end of free movement, the opportunities for UK citizens will be reduced and British businesses hamstrung because of restrictions on the ability of their staff to work in France and Germany. As ever, it’s easy to try to solve problems by taking away other peoples’ rights.

Finally, free movement is a mechanism for economies to converge. Migrant workers relieve unemployment in their home countries and send money back home – the so-called remittances, helping those countries’ economies. And economic convergence may take years, even a decade or two, but is a finite process. Net bilateral migration flows are likely to reduce eventually to zero as the source country develops. If we keep free movement, then eventually Poles, Bulgarians and Romanians will stop coming to the UK to work.

It seems to me that, if we abandon free movement after Brexit on the dubious assumption it was “the” rather than a reason for the vote – of course there’s no denying it was a factor – we’ll be making a huge mistake. The current migration flows from Eastern European countries are a temporary phenomenon, and would reduce as their economies transition to be more like those in the West, and anyone who thinks the UK itself won’t someday need an “unemployment safety valve” is living in cloud cuckoo land. Indeed, net flows of EU migrants may well reverse as the UK economy goes down the pan ahead of Brexit.

The tragedy is that arguments in support of free movement as opposed to other forms of migration were so rarely heard during the referendum campaign.

The moves of chess games have always been in the public domain. Anyone can quote them in any medium including whilst games are in progress. Indeed, in recent years live internet broadcasts of commentary on games at chess tournaments and in matches have become very popular with the chess community.

It was in this context that several chess websites geared up to broadcast commentaries on the most significant chess tournament of 2016, the Candidates tournament in Moscow which opened on March 10th. The winner of the Candidates gets to play the current World Champion in a match for the title of World Chess Champion, so we’re all looking forward to watching Sergey Karjakin challenge Magnus Carlsen in November. But two days before the Candidates started, the organisers, a company called Agon, working with the worldwide chess federation, FIDE, forbade anyone else from broadcasting the moves until 2 hours after each game. They did this by requiring anyone accessing the official website to sign a “Clickwrap Agreement” agreeing not to retransmit the moves. Presumably onsite spectators and journalists were subject to similar restrictions.

Malcolm Pein, the editor of Chess magazine, noted in the May 2016 issue (p.4-5) that Agon’s attempt “to impose a new order on the chess world” were “cack-handed” and it is indeed very unfortunate that FIDE has been involved in preventing a number of websites from supporting what I would have thought is its core objective, promoting the game. The sites are likely to have incurred costs as a result, perhaps having committed to pay commentary teams.

Furthermore, as Pein notes in his Chess editorial, aspects of the Agon Candidates commentary left something to be desired. He highlights an unfortunate incident when the moves were inadvertently shown swapped between games at the start of the last round. I noticed that too, and was also confused for a moment by the disconnect between the commentary and what actually appeared to be happening, but much more serious was the quality of the commentary itself. I felt it was interrupted much too often for breaks, usually to show the same couple of ads, plus what I’ll describe as “pen-portraits” of the players (cartoon-style drawing accompanied by commentary). These were quite entertaining the first time you saw them. Not quite so much the tenth time. And, although the commentary team obviously worked hard to help the audience understand what was going on, I’ve enjoyed other commentators somewhat more. The commentary is much more important in chess than say football, since (as non-players will appreciate!) there are periods of a game when there’s nothing much to see happening on the board. I would have liked the choice to watch another broadcast.

Steve Giddings writes, also in the April edition of Chess (p.8-9), that preventing unauthorised broadcast of chess games is in “the commercial interests of the game”. That may be so, but it seems to me that monopoly broadcasting is not the best way forward.

Given the goals of promoting chess by maximising the number of viewers of chess matches and tournaments and maximising revenue from the broadcast of elite events, simply in order to pay for them, a better option would be to license multiple broadcasters, if they’ll pay collectively more than would a single exclusive media outlet. I outline in this article how the revenue-maximising number of broadcasters could be established by a simple process of bidding for a share of the rights.

First, though, let’s consider how other sports rights are sold and then whether times have changed – perhaps other sports might want to reconsider granting exclusivity – and how chess is different. I focus particularly on the case of domestic rights to broadcast the English Premier League.

The Football Precedent: English Premier League Live Broadcast Rights

When I was a kid, the FA Cup Final was always shown live simultaneously on both BBC1 and ITV. So much for consumer choice – at the time there were only 3 channels (the other one being BBC2). Nevertheless, there was competition, of a sort. Sometimes we’d switch over to see what they were saying on the other side, though when the ads came on we’d switch back.

One might wonder why ITV would bother broadcasting the Cup Final when it was also on BBC (without ad breaks) and, indeed, why the FA would sell it to two broadcasters rather than just one. I can think of two considerations:

There was some product differentiation between the broadcasts on BBC1 and ITV. The channels employed different commentators and pundits. This produces what I would argue is healthy competition for viewers between broadcasters.

Strange though it may seem to many younger readers, back in the day many – perhaps most – households watched either ITV or BBC almost exclusively, even though they both were (and still are) free-to-air. It could be argued that the choice between watching BBC and ITV used to be very much driven by social class or at least the social class households identified themselves as belonging to, but that is actually irrelevant to the argument. The point is that broadcasting the FA Cup Final on both ITV and BBC ensured that the product reached more people – ITV viewers and BBC viewers – than it would have done had it gone out only on BBC or ITV.

Presumably ITV could attract enough viewers and sell enough advertising to make it worthwhile to broadcast the FA Cup Final even though BBC1 was showing it too.

Sports Broadcast Monopolies

Why, then, you might ask, is almost all football shown in the UK now, in 2016, indeed, almost all sport (and much other content besides), broadcast on just one channel? That is:

why have sports broadcast monopolies developed?;

why do sports administrators tolerate and even encourage broadcast monopolies?;

and whose interests do sports broadcast monopolies actually serve?

Some years ago I had the dubious pleasure of a job interview with BT; actually they wasted an entire day of my time at their recruitment centre (and even more with some further interviews later on). The question arose in discussion – I guess after we’d noted the ongoing convergence of internet and broadcast media – as to how BT could best grow their broadband market. I suggested offering some exclusive movies. Perhaps my interlocutor was playing Devil’s advocate, but I don’t think so; regardless, he seemed to be arguing that they should market on the basis of their whizzy new network. No, no, no! The vast majority of consumers care only about what appears on their TV; they don’t care at all about the underlying technology. And if there is some exclusive content – I mentioned movies at my BT interview because Sky had already “done” sport – that is likely to be decisive in winning customers.

It seems clear from their enthusiasm to enter into them that exclusive deals for live sport transmission rights are in the interests of subscription broadcasters, particularly when trying to build a customer base. We have the example of the English Premier League (EPL) and much other sport (as well as films and other content) on Sky, now being contested by BT. Netflix and Amazon are exclusively hosting supposedly must-see drama series.

As a consumer, I’m always wary when I’m told something is “exclusive”. The very word suggests to me that someone is being ripped off. Probably muggins.

But let’s not jump to conclusions. Besides, what we’re really interested in is the health of the sport – that is, chess, when I get to the end of this preamble.

So, could exclusive sports rights sales be in the interests of the sports themselves?

Well, when broadcasters are trying to grow their business – think of Sky and the EPL – they may be prepared to pay what appears to be a substantial premium for a monopoly. I say “appears to be a substantial premium” because at some point the broadcaster has to demonstrate income (advertising and/or subscriptions) commensurate with the expense. Otherwise they go bust.

It’s not immediately apparent, and, indeed, somewhat counter-intuitive, that a single broadcaster of live events or TV series can unlock more advertising and/or subscription income than can multiple broadcasters of the same material. Nevertheless, many sports administrators appear to believe monopoly broadcast deals are in the interest of their sport. At least in the short term.

An example of what can happen in the longer term is provided by EPL broadcast rights in the UK. Sky held the exclusive rights from the start of the Premier League in 1992 until 2007. After the European Commission ruled that Sky should not have exclusive rights to all matches, they had competition, first from Setanta, who ran into financial difficulties, then ESPN, who took over Setanta’s rights and most recently BT who came into the market in 2012 prepared to bid aggressively against Sky for a whole range of football and other sports rights and apparently with equally deep pockets. Guess what happened once there was competition? The total paid for EPL live transmission rights went up. Considerably.

Note, though, that what Sky and BT bid for is how much of the monopoly each enjoys. They are not in direct competition, in the sense of broadcasting the same matches, as BBC1 and ITV used to be in the case of the FA Cup Final.

The only logical conclusion is that – given that live broadcast rights to the EPL have a definite value represented by the income they can generate – they were previously being sold too cheaply! Who’d have thunk it?

Players on £50K a week 5 years ago should be a bit miffed. They could have been on £60K!

Why are BT and Sky paying more than Sky alone did?

Is it a conspiracy against the consumer, as I once read a commentator claiming? Apparently, he wrote (I think it was a “he”) EPL fans would now have to buy two subscriptions. As someone who only buys one, it might be worth pointing out that, unless it’s your team playing, or a key fixture (in which case there’s always the option of going to the pub – a form of pay-per-view) it doesn’t make that much difference which match you watch. You don’t know in advance whether a particular match is going to be exciting. In other words, if you’re only going to watch 20 matches a season, there’s not much point paying for 200.

Are BT and Sky trying to buy or defend market share and therefore overpaying? Well, there may be an element of this, but, first, from the point of view of the sport this is a good thing. Second, companies can’t do this for ever. BT is now established in the market. I doubt they’d be paying so much for 3 years of broadcast rights if they didn’t think they’d make money on the deal.

Has BT unlocked market segments Sky wasn’t reaching? Yes, I believe so. I pay a small add-on to my broadband internet deal to receive BT’s sports channels, which I watch online, on a PC. For the number of matches I actually manage to watch I can justify this cost, but not a Sky subscription (plus charges for set-top boxes and so on).

But it may also have been that Sky was paying less than the EPL transmission rights were worth and making excess profits as a result. These have not necessarily all appeared as profits in its accounts, but may have also been reinvested, for example, in establishing a dominant position in the UK in the broadcast markets for other sports, such as cricket.

A market needs to be competitive to establish the real value of a product. It’s in the long-term interests of sports themselves, I suggest, to maintain a competitive market for broadcast rights and not allow monopolies to develop. Such monopolies might end up underpaying until a competitor eventually challenges them, as, I argue, appears to have happened for EPL live broadcast rights in the UK.

In addition, it’s in the long-term interests of sports for as many people as possible to be able to watch them. This is best achieved by a number of broadcasters with different business models reaching different segments of the market. It’s worth pointing out that sports administrators sometimes ensure that at least some events are “free-to-air” in order to show-case their product, for example the World Cup and, this summer, the UEFA Euro 2016 tournament (at least in most European countries). This month’s FA Cup Final was broadcast on the BBC as well as BT Sport.

Differences Between Chess and Football

After that somewhat longer discussion of football than I had intended, let’s get back to chess. As I’ve argued, even football could consider selling live transmission rights to multiple broadcasters, but are there differences between chess and football) that make monopoly broadcasting a less attractive option in the case of chess?

I believe there are several relevant (though interrelated) differences:

First, live chess is typically broadcast globally, over the internet. This means that the peculiarities of local markets are much less relevant. For example, in the UK the playing field for broadcasting football was uneven when Sky entered the market. Sky had to have content that was not available to the free-to-air channels ITV and the BBC or no-one would have subscribed; and it needed subscriptions to fund the cost of its satellites. OK, there is at least one place where chess appears live on TV: Norway, home of the World Champion, Magnus Carlsen. But given the general reliance on the internet for broadcasting chess, it makes sense to simply leave distribution to the broadcaster and not sell rights separately for different platforms (TV, internet, mobile devices etc).

Second, and related to the first point, the world has moved on in the quarter-century since the EPL broadcast model was established. To some extent sports channel subscription revenues funded a dramatic increase in the number of channels available by enabling satellite and cable TV. But with the growth of TV over the internet, the potential number of channels is vast, and the entry-cost considerably lower than in the past. Broadcasters don’t need huge guaranteed revenues to justify their business models. Furthermore, given the flexibility of advertising charging that is possible on the internet – essentially payment depends on the actual number of viewers – advertisers do not need historic broadcast data. They’ll just pay for what they actually get.

Third, the commentary and presentation is a more significant part of the overall package in the case of chess than it is for football. Personally, for normal tournament commentaries I’m as much interested in who’s commentating than who’s playing. I’d be much more likely to tune in if Maurice Ashley, Danny King or Peter Svidler are explaining a game.

Fourth, chess is still at the experimental stage, still trying to explore what works best in live transmission. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to stifle this process by restricting the number of broadcasters to one.

Fifth, interest in chess is global. Viewers might appreciate broadcasts in their own language as well as English.

Sixth, there are a limited number of marketable chess events. To promote the game, as well as maximise revenues, it makes sense for these to be available to as many viewers as possible.

Seventh, I don’t believe there is a pot of gold waiting for someone able to sell advertising round chess events. Compared to football, it’s always going to be a niche market. Indeed, for many of the chess sites – Chess.com. Chess24.com, the Internet Chess Club (ICC), Playchess.com and so on – that broadcast (or might broadcast) elite chess events, covering live events is, unlike in the case of football, only part of their offering to visitors to their site (who may pay a subscription). These sites also allow you to play online, host articles and instructional videos and so on. Unlike the sports channels of Sky or BT, losing live transmission rights is not an existential threat. They are therefore unlikely to pay huge sums for monopoly rights. Collectively, though, they may pay a decent amount for something that is “nice to have”. The resulting choice for viewers would also be beneficial to the game and raise broadcast standards.

For all these reasons it seems to me that it makes sense for chess events to be hosted by multiple broadcasters.

Price Discovery for Chess Broadcast Rights

Before considering the mechanics of an auction for chess broadcast rights, let’s first establish a principle: all broadcasters will pay the same price.

Live sports transmission rights are generally sold territorially. That’s messy already – people cheat by importing satellite dishes from neighbouring countries and so on- but in the age of internet broadcasting its unworkable.

One might also consider language restrictions. Why should a broadcaster be able to reach the whole Chinese population or the English, Russian, French or Spanish-speaking world for the same price as an Estonian native-language broadcaster? Well, don’t worry about it. The market will take care of things. Broadcast auctions will be a repeat exercise and, if the price is low compared to the size of the market in a specific language, that will simply encourage more broadcasters.

What if some broadcasters are mainstream TV channels, in Norway, for example? Again, don’t worry about it. Just leave distribution up to the broadcasters. TV channels are competing with internet broadcasters. The only restriction should be that a one licence – one broadcast rule. If a broadcaster wants to transmit to multiple audiences, in different languages, say, or by producing different versions tailored to experts and the general public, then they have to buy two or more licences.

What would the broadcasters buy? An automatic feed of the moves (top events nowadays use boards that automatically transmit the moves electronically) is obviously essential. Since you don’t want numerous video cameras in the playing hall, the organisers (or a host broadcaster) would also provide video feeds of the players, often used as background to the commentary (generally in a separate window). Post-game interviews or a press conference are also usual and these could be part of the package, as could clips from the recent innovation of a “confession-box”, where players can comment during their game. Broadcasters would edit these video feeds together with their own commentary to produce their final product.

Let’s make one other thing clear about the objective of the auction process. The goal is to maximise revenue. This is not in conflict with the goal of maximising the online audience and thereby promoting the game.

So, how would the auction work? How can we maximise revenue from an unknown number of broadcasters all paying the same price per transmission stream?

Here’s my suggestion. The broadcasters would be required to submit a number of bids each dependent on the total number of broadcasters. That is, they would bid a certain amount to be the monopoly broadcaster, another amount (lower, assuming they act rationally!) to be one of two broadcasters, another amount to be one of three, and so on, up to some arbitrary number, for example to be one of more than ten broadcasters.

The chess rights holder – FIDE, for example – would simply select the option that generates most revenue. All bidders would of course pay what the lowest bidder offered to be one of the specific number of bidders chosen. E.g., if 2 bidders are successful, one bidding $70,000 to be one of two broadcasters and the other $60,000, both would pay $60,000. In this case, neither broadcaster, nor any other, would have bid more than $120,000 for exclusive rights and no 3 more than $40,000 to be one of 3 broadcasters, nor 4 more than $30,000 to be one of 4, and so on.

For example, it may be the case that one bidder bids more to be the sole broadcaster than any two bid to be dual broadcasters, any three to be the only three broadcasters and so on. In that case, one broadcaster would secure a monopoly. Or, at the other extreme, 12 broadcasters might, for example, bid more to be one of “more than ten” broadcasters than any sole broadcaster bid for a monopoly and so on, and more than 13/12 times what the unlucky 13th highest bidding broadcaster bid to be one of “more than ten” broadcasters, 14/12 times what the 14th highest bidder bid, 20/12 times what the 20th bid and so on up to the total number of bidders.

It’s my guess that revenue will be maximised for a World Championship match by a relatively large number of bidders. And the crucial point is that the more broadcasters, the larger the audience and the greater the choice for viewers.

I had some further thoughts some weeks ago, and, it’s time I cleared away a loose end by writing them up.

My Original Proposed Explanation

Let’s recap. The story so far is that, based on certain characteristics of the orbits of Sedna and a dozen or so other distant minor planets – often referred to as trans-Neptunian objects or TNOs – several groups of researchers have proposed a “Planet X” or sometimes “Planet Nine”, Pluto, the ninth planet for a certain generation, having been relegated to mere “minor planet” status. As I consider the demotion of Pluto to be utterly ridiculous, I’m going to stick to the terminology “Planet X” for the hypothetical distant planet. You can take “X” to be the Roman numeral if you want.

I was immediately sceptical about the existence of Planet X. Some other explanation for the TNO orbits seemed more probable to me. Planet X would be exceptional, compared to the eight (or nine) known planets, not only in its distance from the Sun, but also in the plane of its orbit. To explain the strange features of the orbits of the minor planets by the known “Kozai mechanism” of gravitational “shepherding” of smaller objects by a large body, Planet X would have to orbit perpendicular to the plane of the Solar System, within a few degrees of which the planes of the orbits of all the other planets lie.

Some weeks ago then, in my first post on the subject, I reviewed what had been written on the subject of Planet X. I think now that I was perhaps overly influenced by the Scientific American article on the subject and considered much the most important aspect of the minor planets’ orbits to be their near 0˚ arguments of perihelion (AOPs). That is, they cross the plane of the Solar System roughly when they are nearest the Sun.

On reflection, I was perhaps wrong to be so dismissive of the eccentricity of the minor planets’ orbits. All orbits are eccentric, I pointed out. But the minor planets orbits are really quite eccentric. There may be a cause of this eccentricity.

I also think it is important that the minor planets’ orbits are highly inclined to the plane of the Solar System compared to those of the inner planets, but they are nevertheless less inclined than random, i.e. in most cases somewhat less than 30˚.

I went on to suggest that perhaps something (other than Planet X) was pulling the minor planets towards the plane of the Solar System. I suggested it was simply the inner planets, since there would be a component of the gravitational attraction of the minor planets perpendicular to the plane of the Solar System. I included a diagram which I reproduce once again:

In my second post about Planet X a few days later, I looked more closely at the original scientific papers, in particular those by Trujillo & Sheppard and Batygin & Brown. I wondered why my suggestion had been rejected, albeit implicitly. To cut a long story short, the only evidence that the minor planet orbits can’t be explained by the gravity of the inner eight planets (and the Sun) is computer modelling described in the paper by Trujillo & Sheppard. I wondered if this could have gone wrong somehow.

Problems with Naive Orbital Flattening

Let’s term my original explanation “Naive Orbital Flattening”. There are some issues with it:

First, if the minor planets are “falling” towards the plane of the Solar System, as in my figure, as well as orbiting its centre of gravity, they would overshoot and “bounce”. They would have no way of losing the momentum towards the plane of the Solar System, so, after reaching an inclination of 0˚, their inclination would increase again on the opposite side of the plane as it were (I say “as it were” since the minor planets would cross the plane of the Solar System twice on each orbit, of course).

Second, mulling the matter over, there is no reason why orbital flattening wouldn’t have been detected by computer modelling. Actually, I tell a lie; there is a reason. The reason is that the process would be too slow. Far from bouncing, it turns out that the minor planets would not have had time for their orbital inclinations to decline to 0˚ even once. I did some back of the envelope calculations – several times in fact – and if you imagine the minor planets falling towards the plane of the Solar System under the gravity of the component of the inner planets’ orbits perpendicular to the plane and give yourself 4 billion years, the minor planets would only have fallen a small fraction of the necessary distance!

Third, we have this issue of the AOP. The AOPs of the inner planets precess because of the gravitational effect of the other planets as they orbit the Sun (with some tweaks arising from relativity). It’s necessary to explain why this precession wouldn’t occur for the minor planets.

Missing Mass

However you look at it, explaining the orbits of the minor planets must involve finding some mass in the Solar System! One possible explanation is Planet X. But could there be another source of missing mass?

Well, trying to rescue my theory, I was reading about the history of the Solar System. As you do.

It turns out that the Kuiper Belt, beyond Neptune, now masses only a fraction of the Earth. At one time it must have had at least 30 times the mass of the Earth, in order for the large objects we see today to form at all. Trouble is, the consensus is that all that stuff either spiralled into the Sun, or was driven into interstellar space, depending on particle size, by the effect of solar radiation and the solar wind.

The science doesn’t seem done and dusted, however. Perhaps there is more mass in the plane of the Solar System than is currently supposed. Stop Press: Thanks to New Scientist I’m alerted to a paper that suggests exactly that – see the Addendum at the end of this piece.

It seems to me a likely place for particles to end up is around the heliopause, about 125 AU (i.e. 125 times the Earth’s orbit) from the Sun, because this is where the Solar wind collides with the interstellar medium. You can imagine that forces pushing particles – of a certain range of sizes – out of the Solar System might at this point balance those pushing them back in.

Sophisticated Orbital Flattening

OK, there’s a big “if”, but if there is somewhat more mass – the remains of the protoplanetary disc – in the plane of the Solar System than is generally assumed, then it might be possible to explain the orbits of Sedna and the other TNOs quite neatly. All we have to assume is that the mass is concentrated in the inner part of the TNOs orbits, let’s say from the Kuiper Belt through the heliopause at ~125 AU.

First, the AOPs of around 0˚ are even easier to explain than by the effects of the inner planets. As for the inner planets, the mass would have greatest effect on the TNOs when they are nearest perihelion, so would perturb the orbits most then, as discussed in my previous posts. The improvement in the explanation is that there is no need to worry about AOP precession. Because the mass is in a disc, and therefore distributed relatively evenly around the Sun, its rotation has no gravitational effect on the minor planets. And it is the rotation of the other planets that causes each planet’s AOP precession.

Second, we need to observe that there is a trade-off between orbital inclination and eccentricity as in the Kozai effect, due to conservation of angular momentum in the plane of the Solar System. Thus, as the inclination of the TNOs’ orbits is eroded, so their orbits become more eccentric. This could have one or 3 possible consequences:

it could be that, as I concluded for the effects of the inner planets alone, there has not been time for the TNOs’ orbits to flatten to 0˚ inclination in the 4 billion or so years since the formation of the Solar System.

or, it could be that the TNOs we observe are doomed in the sense that their orbits will be perturbed by interactions with the planets if they stray further into the inner Solar System – assuming they don’t actually collide with one of the inner planets – and we don’t observe TNOs that have already been affected in this way.

or, it could be that the TNOs’ orbits eventually reach an inclination of 0˚ and “bounce” back into more inclined orbits. The point is that the eccentricity of the orbits of such bodies would decline again, so we may not observe them so easily, since the objects are so far away we can only see them when they are closest to the Sun.

Which of these possibilities actually occurs would depend on the amount and distribution of the proposed additional mass I am suggesting may exist in the plane of the Solar System. My suspicion is that the orbital flattening process would be very slow, but it is possible different objects are affected in different ways, depending on initial conditions, such as their distance from the Sun.

Now I really will write to the scientists to ask whether this is plausible. Adding some mass in the plane of the Solar System to Mercury symplectic integrator modelling would indicate whether or not Sophisticated Orbital Flattening is a viable hypothesis.

Addendum: I mentioned towards the start of this post that the search continues for Planet X. I can’t help remarking that this doesn’t strike me as good science. What research should be trying to do is explain the observations, i.e. the characteristics of the minor planets’ orbits, not trying to explain Planet X, which is as yet merely an unproven hypothetical explanation of those observations. Anyway, this week’s New Scientist notes that:

“…the planet could have formed where we find it now. Although some have speculated that there wouldn’t be enough material in the outer solar system, Kenyon found that there could be enough icy pebbles to form something as small as Planet Nine in a couple of hundred million years (arxiv.org/abs/1603.08008).”

Aha! Needless to say I followed the link provided by New Scientist and it turns out that the paper by Kenyon & Bromley does indeed suggest a mechanism for a debris disc at the right sort of distance in the Solar System. They focus, though, on modelling how Planet X might have formed. They find that it could exist, if the disc had the right characteristics, but it also may not have done. It all depends on the “oligarchs” (seed planets) and the tendency of the debris to break up in collisions. This is from their Summary (my explanatory comment in square brackets):

We use a suite of coagulation calculations to isolate paths for in situ production of super-Earth mass planets at 250–750 AU around solar-type stars. These paths begin with a massive ring, M0 >~ 15 M⊕ [i.e. more than 15 times the mass of the Earth], composed of strong pebbles, r0 ≈ 1 cm, and a few large oligarchs, r ≈ 100 km. When these systems contain 1–10 oligarchs, two phases of runaway growth yield super-Earth mass planets in 100–200 Myr at 250 AU and 1–2 Gyr at 750 AU. Large numbers of oligarchs stir up the pebbles and initiate a collisional cascade which prevents the growth of super-Earths. For any number of oligarchs, systems of weak pebbles are also incapable of producing a super-Earth mass planet in 10 Gyr.

They don’t consider the possibility that the disc itself could explain the orbits of the minor planets. And may indeed be where they originated in the first place. In fact, the very existence of the minor planets could suggest there were too many “oligarchs” for a “super-Earth” to form. Hmm!

The idea that there may be a Planet X is not original to the Batygin and Brown paper. It was also proposed in particular by Chadwick A. Trujillo and Scott S. Sheppard in a Nature paper A Sedna-like body with a perihelion of 80 astronomical units dated 27th March 2014. The New Scientist and Scientific American feature articles were not informed by Batygin and Brown. Scientific American explicitly referenced Trujillo and Sheppard (as well as a paper by C and R de la Fuente Marcos).

A key part of the evidence for a “Planet X” is that for the orbits of a number of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) – objects outside the orbit of Neptune – including the minor planet Sedna, the argument of perihelion is near 0˚. That is, they cross the plane of the planets near when they are closest to the Sun. The suggestion is that this is not coincidental and can only be explained by the action of an undiscovered planet, perhaps 10 times the mass of the Earth, lurking out there way beyond Neptune. An old idea, the “Kozai mechanism”, is invoked to explain how Planet X could be controlling the TNOs, as noted, for example, by C and R de la Fuente Marcos in their paper Extreme trans-Neptunian objects and the Kozai mechanism: signalling the presence of trans-Plutonian planets.

I proposed a simpler explanation for the key finding. My argument is based on the fact that the mass of the inner Solar System is dispersed from its centre of gravity, in particular because of the existence of the planets. Consequently, the gravitational force acting on the distant minor planets can be resolved into a component towards the centre of gravity of the Solar System, which keeps them in orbit, and, when averaged over time and because their orbits are inclined to the plane of the Solar System, another component at 90˚ to the first, towards the plane of the orbits of the eight major planets:

My suggestion is that this second component tend will gradually reduce the inclination of the minor planets’ orbits. Furthermore, the force towards the plane of the Solar System will be strongest when the minor planets are at perihelion on their eccentric orbits, not just in absolute terms, but also when averaged over time, taking into account varying orbital velocity as described by Kepler. This should eventually create orbits with an argument of perihelion near 0˚, as observed.

Has such an effect been taken into account by those proposing a Planet X? The purpose of this second post on the topic is to look a little more closely at how the two main papers, Batygin & Brown and Trujillo & Sheppard tested for this possibility.

Batygin & Brown

The paper by Batygin and Brown does not document any original research that would have shown AOPs tending towards 0˚ without a Planet X by the mechanism I suggest. Here’s what they say:

“To motivate the plausibility of an unseen body as a means of explaining the data, consider the following analytic calculation. In accord with the selection procedure outlined in the preceding section, envisage a test particle that resides on an orbit whose perihelion lies well outside Neptune’s orbit, such that close encounters between the bodies do not occur. Additionally, assume that the test particle’s orbital period is not commensurate (in any meaningful low-order sense—e.g., Nesvorný & Roig 2001) with the Keplerian motion of the giant planets.

The long-term dynamical behavior of such an object can be described within the framework of secular perturbation theory (Kaula 1964). Employing Gauss’s averaging method (see Ch. 7 of Murray & Dermott 1999; Touma et al. 2009), we can replace the orbits of the giant planets with massive wires and consider long-term evolution of the test particle under the associated torques. To quadrupole order in planet–particle semimajor axis ratio, the Hamiltonian that governs the planar dynamics of the test particle is [as close as I can get the symbols to the original]:

Η=-¼(GM/a) (1-e2)-3/2 Σ4i=1(miai2)/Ma2

In the above expression, G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the Sun, mi and ai are the masses and semimajor axes of the giant planets, while a and e are the test particle’s semimajor axis and eccentricity, respectively.

Equation (1) is independent of the orbital angles, and thus implies (by application of Hamilton’s equations) apsidal precession at constant eccentricity… in absence of additional effects, the observed alignment of the perihelia could not persist indefinitely, owing to differential apsidal precession.” [my stress].

After staring at this for a bit I noticed that the equation does not include the inclination of the orbit of test particle, just its semimajor axis (i.e. mean distance from the Sun) and eccentricity. Then I saw that the text also only refers to the “planar dynamics of the test particle”, i.e. its behaviour in two, not three dimensions.

Later in the paper Batygin and Brown note (in relation to their modelling in general, not just what I shall call the “null case” of no Planet X) that:

“…an adequate account for the data requires the reproduction of grouping in not only the degree of freedom related to the eccentricity and the longitude of perihelion, but also that related to the inclination and the longitude of ascending node. Ultimately, in order to determine if such a confinement is achievable within the framework of the proposed perturbation model, numerical simulations akin to those reported above must be carried out, abandoning the assumption of coplanarity.”

I can’t say I found Batygin & Brown very easy to follow, but it’s fairly clear that they haven’t modeled the Solar System in a fully 3-dimensional manner.

Trujillo & Sheppard

If we have to discount Batygin & Brown, then the only true test of the null case is that in Trujillo & Sheppard. Last time I quoted the relevant sentence:

“By numerically simulating the known mass in the solar system on the inner Oort cloud objects, we confirmed that [they] should have random ω [i.e. AOP]… This suggests that a massive outer Solar System perturber may exist and [sic, meaning “which”, perhaps] restricts ω for the inner Oort cloud objects.”

I didn’t mention that they then referred to the Methods section at the end of their paper. Here’s what they say there (and I’m having to type this in because I only have a paper copy! – so much for scientific and technological progress!):

“Dynamical simulation. We used the Mercury integrator to simulate the long-term behaviour of ω for the Inner Oort cloud objects and objects with semi-major axes greater than 150AU and perihelia greater than Neptune. The goal of this simulation was to attempt to explain the ω clustering. The simulation shows that for the currently known mass in the Solar System, ω for all objects circulates on short and differing timescales dependent on the semi-major acis and perihelion (for example, 1,300 Myr, 500 Myr, 100 Myr and 650 Myr for Sedna, 2012 VP113, 2000 CR105 and 2010 GB17, respectively).”

In other words their model reproduced the “apsidal precession” proposed in Batygin & Brown, but since Trujillo & Sheppard refer to ω, the implication is that their simulation was in 3 dimensions and not “planar”.

However, could the model used by Trujillo and Sheppard have somehow not correctly captured the interaction between the TNOs and the inner planets? The possibilities range from apsidal precession being programmed in to the Mercury package (stranger things have happened!) to something more subtle, resulting from the simplifications necessary for Mercury to model Solar System dynamics.

Maybe I’d better pluck up courage and ask Trujillo and Sheppard my stupid question! Of course, the effect I propose would have to dominate apsidal precession, but that’s definitely possible when apsidal precession is on a timescale of 100s of millions of years, as found by Trujillo and Sheppard.